1 processor vs. 2
Danny Pansters
danny at ricin.com
Wed Mar 3 15:50:57 PST 2004
(enough CCing, back to list only)
On Wednesday 03 March 2004 22:36, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 10:26:43PM +0100, Stefan Cars wrote:
> > Okey, but if you would compare RAID-1 on two disks compared to RAID-5 on
> > three disks then ? What would be the faster ?
>
> RAID1 is going to be faster, both reading and writing, but it will
> take a lot more raw disk space to provide the required usable space.
No, it would require 2 identical disks, whereas RAID5 with 3 disks would
require 3 of those disks ;-)
Physical disks are your unit of failure or of resilliance if you like. That's
why you need 5+ drives for RAID5 to be any real fun. You want your data to be
present at least twice on different physical drives. You want the same for
your parity info. The mere fact that you stripe everything out with RAID5
doesn't change your physical unit which is one disk. Resilliance means: what
happens if a random drive fails. RAID5 on 3 disks defeats the purpose of
RAID5 IMHO. Theoretically the more drives, the better RAID5 gets, so that
might say something about Veritas if they warned against using more than 7
drives. Perhaps grog can be the final referee here, not my turf ;-)
Having said that I don't have a RAID5, but I would recommend OP to use RAID1
and use the 3rd drive as a (semi) hot spare for extra sleep security and less
spending. It's much more interesting if you can (un)plug a spare on the fly
BTW.
I just kinda fell back into the developed thread, hope you don't mind me
adding a general remark: One doesn't do RAID to increase performance. Period.
If budget is no problem, buy spare boxen and use them "secondary", always
nominated to become "primary" at any time. That's better insurance against
(any) hardware failure than mere RAID can ever be IMHO.
Greets,
Dan
More information about the freebsd-questions
mailing list